Beau Brummel — Elgar’s Lost Masterpiece

In 1928 Elgar was asked by the actor-manager Gerald Lawrence to provide incidental music for a new play entitled Beau Brummel, in which Lawrence was to play the starring role. Elgar obliged, although he had by that time virtually given up composition, and the play was premiered at the Theatre Royal in Birmingham on 5th November 1928. Elgar himself conducted the orchestra on the First Night.

One short excerpt from the score, the Beau Brummel Minuet (this is published by Acuta Music : click here for details), was published in 1929, but the rest of the music subsequently vanished.

Until 2011, virtually no effective research on Beau Brummel had been carried out by Elgar scholars. It was believed that the play had only been performed in Birmingham, and that it consisted of the Minuet and little else. Searches for the lost music were carried out in Birmingham but with no success.

In December 2011 an article in the Elgar Society Journal (the relevant issue is available online: click here for link) revealed for the first time that :

(i) The play had not only been performed in Birmingham but had subsequently gone on tour both in the UK and in South Africa (so searches in Birmingham had been doomed to failure from the start).

(ii) Contemporary newspaper reports indicated that the music was at least as extensive and resourceful as had been Elgar’s previous incidental music, for the play Arthur (this is available from Acuta Music in a concert score entitled King Arthur Suite — click here for details). The reviews implied that the music was memorable and of high quality.

(iii) The full score would have been at least 100 pages long, possibly as much as 200.

In contrast to previous received opinions about the Beau Brummel music — that it was a minor piece, of which the Minuet was the main component — the 2011 research indicates that Elgar’s score was a significant work, possibly with crucial implications for his later compositional technique and output. Newspaper reports seem to imply that it was similar to a film score, where music plays continuously underneath the dialogue and by the use of musical motifs comments on and amplifies the stage action.

The question today is : what happened to the music?

It appears that Elgar allowed Gerald Lawrence to keep the performing materials, consisting of the orchestral parts and a piano-conductor score (probably in Elgar’s own handwriting). The chances of these materials having survived are fairly remote (Lawrence died in 1957 and, since Beau Brummel’s creation, had lived in three residences in Hampstead (London) and also in Exmouth (Devon)) but they could have been passed on by him to his daughter (the well-known actress Joyce Carey (d.1993)), his third wife (actress Madge Compton, real name Madge Mussared (d.1969)) or any other member of his family.

As regards the full score (which would also have been an Elgar original manuscript), it is fairly certain that Elgar was in possession of this around 1930. He is known to have given the Arthur incidental music to the conductor Joseph Lewis (d.1954) : Lewis was Professor of Conducting at the Guildhall School of Music and in the early 1950s gave the Arthur score to one of his pupils. Possibly Elgar also gave Lewis the Beau Brummel score, and it could then have been passed on to another Guildhall pupil or colleague.

Elgar, however, had many professional friends and contacts, and the Beau Brummel score could equally well have been given to any one of them, perhaps with a request for that person to make it into a performable concert Suite. There is also the possibility that Elgar intended to cannibalise the Beau Brummel music for other projects (as he did with Arthur) and may have destroyed it to cover his tracks (he did not destroy the Arthur score although the latter’s whereabouts remained unknown until 1973). The chance of the full score still surviving, although slim, must however be counted as slightly better than that for the orchestral parts.

It is possible that the Beau Brummel materials, comprising full score and/or orchestral parts and piano-conductor score, still exist. If they do, they are probably now in the hands of non-musicians (the descendants of the original protagonists) and their artistic significance (as containing hitherto unknown music by the mature Elgar) — quite apart from their very considerable financial value — may not be recognised by their current owners.